R. Reuven Margoliyot (1889-1971), whose yahrzeit falls today, the seventh of Elul, authored dozens of books, and possibly the best known among them is his commentary to Sanhedrin, Margoliyot HaYam(Jerusalem, 1958), which sits on the table of serious students of that tractate. While that work has informed and illuminated many with the “pearls” it contains within its commentary, the two pages of introduction preceding that have something particularly extraordinary to say.

The introduction is unlike that of most other books of its kind. It contains nothing about the tractate, no description of the commentary's method, no survey of the works that came before it, no statement of what the author hoped to contribute, and no acknowledgment of those who assisted him. The whole of it is given over to a story from the Talmud, and to R. Margoliyot's interpretation of that story, followed by his signature. The story is not even drawn from Sanhedrin, but from a completely unrelated tractate. Nothing in the introduction explains why it appears there, or what bearing it has on the volume that follows, and the reader is left to work that out for himself.

That story (Taanit 21a) is about Ilfa and R. Yochanan, who were studying Torah together, but were pressed by poverty, so much so that they resolved to go out and earn a living, saying that they would thereby fulfill "there shall be no destitute among you" (Deut. 15:4). While they sat and ate beneath an unstable wall, R. Yochanan overheard two ministering angels, one of whom proposed toppling the wall upon them, since they were "abandoning eternal life and occupying themselves with temporal life." The other objected that one of the two was destined for greatness. R. Yochanan asked Ilfa whether he had heard anything, and when Ilfa answered that he had not, R. Yochanan concluded that the reference had been to himself. He turned back, applying to himself instead the verse "the destitute will not cease from within the land" (Deut. 15:11), while Ilfa went on to trade. By the time Ilfa returned, R. Yochanan had been installed at the head of the academy, and Ilfa was told that had he remained and studied, the appointment would have been his. He thereupon suspended himself from a ship's mast and declared that if anyone could bring him a question from a baraita of R. Chiya and R. Oshaya that he could not resolve from the Mishnah, he would release his grip and drown. An elder came forward with one, and Ilfa resolved it.

Many presentations of this passage read it as a message about life decisions, in which R. Yochanan is presented as having chosen correctly. Some explain, for example, that although R. Yochanan is the one identified as having heard the angels, this was not a matter of his having been given an advantage that Ilfa was denied; it was rather that Ilfa was not listening for the message.

R. Margoliyot, however, saw a different lesson. He first gathers together the indications in the story that Ilfa stood as the equal, or even the superior, of R. Yochanan and would have been fully worthy of the position he did not receive. Ilfa is named first; R. Yochanan addresses him with the honorific ‘mar’; Ilfa is told that the appointment would have been his had he remained, which concedes that it was his to lose, and Rashi (s.v. i ativ mar ve-garis) states explicitly that the townspeople would have crowned Ilfa as they crowned R. Yochanan, since Ilfa was the more learned of the two.

R. Margoliyot then adds to this the background not given in this passage. R. Yochanan possessed a patrimony, and in his youth, he sold his property and his ancestral holdings in order to sustain himself through the years of his study, giving up all he had out of his love for the Torah. Ilfa had nothing to sell. He had inherited neither field nor vineyard, and lacking any means of maintaining himself and his household until he reached the years in which he would be fit to issue rulings, he was compelled to turn to commerce and to say that Torah is good together with a worldly occupation. What had looked like a contrast between two attitudes toward Torah turns out to be a contrast between a man who could afford to remain and a man who could not.

There is a familiar contemporary claim, popularized in Malcolm Gladwell's Outliers and other books, that sustained accumulated practice accounts for extraordinary achievement more reliably than native gifts do. Even if so, the point is not as meritocratic as it may sound, since there are many whose circumstances do not allow them to devote that time, however great their gifts may be. Ilfa's gifts were never in question, nor was his devotion. What he lacked was the reality in which those hours could be invested.

R. Margoliyot writes poignantly about how Ilfa devoted his nights to study, even though his days were committed to labor, in commerce or in “the office.” The anachronistic introduction of an office transports the reader out of the Talmudic era and into the present, hinting at others who are simultaneously being described here.

R. Margoliyot understands the angels' charge as bearing on the character of the Torah that would be learned under such conditions rather than on its abandonment. The angels spoke severely even though they knew that even as merchants neither would slacken in his learning; Torah of that kind, however, remains only “temporal life” for the one who learns it; only complete commitment could become Torah of “eternal life.”

R. Margoliyot's Ilfa has no fixed circle of students and no regular hours in which to teach. He therefore chooses another means by which his Torah will be eternal life rather than temporal life: he writes it down. Whatever he arrives at in the hours he sets aside for study he records in his notebooks, and the notebooks circulate.

In making this point, it is not incidental that R. Margoliyot's erudition is evident: he notes references in Menachot (70a) of what was written in Ilfa's pinkas(notebook), and its counterpart in the Yerushalmi (Maasrot 2:4), where R. Yonah reports having found something written in the pinkas of Chilfai. There are the places in which R. Yochanan learned from Ilfa's words and transmitted teachings in his name, in Zevachim and in the Yerushalmi in Terumot, Challah, and Shabbat. A scholar who led no school nonetheless reached the generation after him, through his writing.

True, Ilfa did not receive the appointment that ultimately went to R. Yochanan. Ilfa, says R. Margoliyot, had no wish whatever to reign; his longings were to learn and to teach, to give others a means of taking hold of the Torah, to draw from the earliest sources and give sustenance to those thirsty for the word of God, in the conversation of colleagues and in the publication of what he had written. A private individual who holds no office and does not presume to rule, he adds, has no need to drill himself in the decisions of the latest of the later authorities, and does not occupy himself with abridgments of the halakha; his free hours go instead to the essentials of the Torah and the roots of the laws, and he resolves the questions of the later authorities out of the teaching of the earlier ones, drawing living water from the source of the spring.

The introduction ends there, seemingly without having told us any of what introductions to such works ordinarily tell us. In truth, it has told us everything we need to know.

R. Margoliyot was born in Lemberg on the seventh of Kislev, 5650. He qualified as a rabbi but remained in business, working eventually as a bookseller, and was active in Mizrachi in Lvov before settling in Eretz Yisrael in the mid-1930s, where he became librarian of the Rambam Library in Tel Aviv (Encyclopaedia Judaica, s.v. Margaliot, Reuben). He never held a rabbinic post and never headed a yeshiva; the library, his only institutional position, came to him after his forty-fifth year. He published more than fifty books, beginning with Toldot Adam on the Maharsha, which appeared in Lemberg in 1912, when he was twenty-two.

Soon after that, he began writing his glosses to the Shulchan Aruch, Nefesh Chayah. In the introduction to that work, written as a memorial to his wife and main source of support, Chayah, he was more explicit about the book’s history, and his own:

“"Had Your Torah not been my delight, I would have perished in my affliction" (Ps. 119:92). These words of the divine psalmist I can apply to this book of mine, which I wrote and arranged in the very days of the burning, the days of the World War, after my return from the exile of the refugees of Galicia, having been classified as fit to go out to the field of slaughter. Although I never wished to make use of the crown of Torah, in that hour of danger I said that I must seek my release from military service on the basis of my certificate, since before the outbreak of the terrible war I had already been ordained to render halakhic decisions by the authorization of the kings, our Rabbis. The authorities, however, were in no haste to determine my case, and close to two years passed…

“I was compelled to shut myself away in an inner room until my case should be decided. Were I to say that I would recount everything that passed over me during those two years, this introduction of mine would become a book of memoirs, which perhaps has no claim to a volume of its own. Here I will recall only this: the long winter nights, when I was shut up alone in my room, lacking everything, and lacking even a lamp. Out of fear that the household, seeing a lamp burning all evening, would sense that a man was hiding in the dwelling, no lamp was lit at all. By the light of the flame within the winter stove I studied and wrote, stretched out on the floor. In such a condition of crushed spirit, of which it is said "in the morning you shall say, would that it were evening" (Deut. 28:67), yet together with this within a faithful family circle of pure and holy love, of hope and of the vision of life, I arranged and set in order this book of mine.

“At that time I did not have books enough at hand to slake my thirst and my longing. Afterward, when my documents were confirmed and I was released, before the dissolution of the Austro-Hungarian empire, even then I had neither tranquility nor rest. In the days of the terrible pogroms the robbers struck me [word uncertain] and plundered my place of business, leaving not even the gleanings. From then on I was entangled in various burdens I was obliged to take up for the household and for my own home, along with communal affairs and the needs of the public. Even so, in the evening hours granted me from time to time, by the kindness of God I arranged many books in all the branches of Torah, of which some twenty have already been printed. My fortune has been favorable in that these books found much favor in the eyes of all the great and the wise of Israel and are already dispersed throughout the communities of Israel, thank God; and I still have with me many completed compositions which I hope to publish before long.

“The Sages have already stated (Eruvin 55a) that the Torah is found neither among sea-traders nor among peddlers, and so it will certainly not occur to anyone to rely upon me for practical halakha. This is not out of any humility I possess, in the manner of the great authors who write so in their introductions; it is the plain truth. I accept no responsibility whatever on behalf of others, and all my words are only to alert the student. Although many have trodden this ground and it is possible that others preceded me in some of these matters, thank God, any student will see that many are the matters in which room was left for me to say something new. It is a misfortune that on account of the costs of printing I was compelled to omit a great deal…

“It would therefore have been fitting to hide among the vessels. Yet since, thank God, many now study and reflect upon the books I have already published, I hope my colleagues will take pleasure in these words as well, and that the merit of the many will depend upon me. My own intention in preparing these matters for the press is that the pen be passed for the sake of God and the holiness of His Torah.”

In that introduction, he lists many of the books he still hoped to write. In 1957, having pursued his dreams, he was awarded the Israel Prize in recognition of his many contributions. Margoliyot HaYam appeared the following year. The introduction was therefore written by a man who had just received his country's highest recognition for a lifetime of Torah scholarship produced without a chair, without students, and without any of the ordinary support. To introduce that volume, he allowed his Torah to stand alone and speak on his behalf.

Naftali Ben-Menachem's bibliography of his writings, printed in the Sefer Margoliyot memorial volume, records among them a list published in Lemberg in the 1930s, a catalogue of the books in his bookstore. A merchant of seforim, whose own seforim were relied upon by those who came to buy from him, opened his commentary on Sanhedrin with the story of a merchant whose notebooks were relied upon by the sages of his generation, and explained that this earlier merchant had never aspired to a position of authority; he was well aware of the contribution he was able to make from where he was.

R. Margoliyot inspired many to recognize that they had a portion in the Torah as well even if their circumstances limited their time. And those who were able to be more completely devoted were uplifted as well to appreciate the opportunities they had been given (see, for example, the introduction to R. Yaakov Epstein’s Chevel Nachalato, Vol. XIV).

As we remember R. Reuven Margoliyot on his yahrzeit, we honor a man who found his own way to his place in the Torah, who recognized his own journey in that of an earlier figure who had traveled it before him, and who then, with no further explanation, told us this story, trusting us to hear in it that he was asking us to do the same.